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This is the first in a series of open letters written to Technovation students by their supporters. People around the world are impressed by the young women who participate in Technovation and want to cheer you all on and offer some advice and words of encouragement!

Hi ladies,

You’re more than half way through your program with Iridescent Learning.

I’ve been following your stories and ideas that you’re bringing to life. What you are doing is incredible: You are taking a stand for your own future and learning valuable skills in how to create the change you want to see in your life, your family, community and the world.

I am sure you’ve come across challenges and there have been times when you wanted to quit – maybe your team wasn’t communicating or working together, or your MVP (prototype) failed, or maybe you’re behind on deadlines. But, you didn’t quit and that shows me how dedicated you are to the project and to bettering yourself.

You have invested in the greatest thing ever: YOU!

Everything you are learning will be with you for the rest of your life. You are growing from the challenges, mistakes and the success you achieve.

Keep moving forward and persevering with your project because you are becoming a person who others see as driven, determined and an inspiration to help others to create something in their own lives.

We recently had the chance to catch up with Briana Berger, who participated in Technovation in 2016 and was named a semi-finalist for her app SleepBeep. Read on to hear about her early experiences with technology, the challenges she’s faced in tech, and her advice to young women who are interested in technology and entrepreneurship.

Tell us about yourself!

My name is Briana Berger. I’m a seventeen year-old Technovation Alumni from Gainesville, FL. I love to understand the ins and outs of everything. I always ask questions, and I think that my love for code grew out of that. It also probably explains why my toddler-self “researched” why baked cookies taste good by eating the cookie dough. As my yearning to learn grew, I have become a leader in my community for events and in coding.

I founded my own non-profit called SeniorTechNet to encourage seniors to use technology and some I have even taught to code. I also founded a club at my school called coderGirls, where I teach Python and we compete in Verizon’s Innovation Challenge. Under the club, I have created coderKids, a community outreach, to teach young kids to code, and I founded the yearly Florida Hackathons for Floridian high school students to innovate and learn. (Ed note: since we talked to Briana, coderGirls has launched as a national nonprofit organization!)

Technovation recently had the chance to reconnect with Soumya who is a 2015 Alumna and hear about her experience with tech, what she’s working on now, and what advice she has to girls interested in technology and entrepreneurship.

My name is Soumya Tejam and I participated in the Technovation Challenge in the 2015 season. My world pitch experience has in the most cliched manner changed my life. In the past two years, I’ve gone from zero coding experience to teaching a group of underprivileged girls in my community how to code, starting my own company and developing my app Cappable.

The app that I built for Technovation is called Cappable and it acts as a bridge connecting physically challenged job aspirants with corporations willing to hire them and NGO’s aiming to help them. It will be available for Android and iOS very soon and through the process of programming it, I’ve enriched my programming skills which I hope to implement in other projects. I’ve got positive feedback from the people who I hope will use this app and I can’t wait to see it in action.

Since World Pitch, I have also founded a business venture — BookBite. Founded in the summer of 2016, BookBite is a subscription box service thats sends out a curated package containing a Young Adult novel, short stories by budding novelists, bookish goodies, and an exciting online experience which gives you access to discussion forums and online downloadables. I started BookBite because I noticed the lack of passionate readers in our community and sought to change that attitude among my peers. Through the process I’ve learnt a good load about running a business, from customer acquisition to engagement and retainment. Through BookBite, I’ve run competitions, BookTalks, donation drives, and reading sessions. I’ve also gotten the opportunity to present my venture to Sandy Carter and speak at the IBM India Onward conference with Vanitha Narayanan in Delhi about the work that I’ve been doing.

We are often asked if men can mentor in Technovation. The answer is yes, because being a Technovation mentor is about supporting young women and their interests in technology and entrepreneurship. Technovation mentors young women develop their confidence and leadership skills as well as their technical skills. It is also helpful for girls to see men and women working together to promote STEM education for girls. We do encourage men who want to volunteer as mentors do so in partnership with a woman.

This week, we would like to introduce you to a male mentor, Ugi Augustine from Calibar, Nigeria. We hope that his experience as a male mentor will encourage other men to volunteer. We also asked Ugi how he supports his team.

Why did you want to mentor in an all girl’s program?

The idea of having women develop software moved me into becoming a Technovation mentor. Professionally, I already impact knowledge and urge my employees and team members to achieve the unthinkable, but so far we have no women on our team. I believe that one or all of the ladies we currently mentor would become very good software developers.

Grace Ihejiamaizu had introduced me to team CHARIS and [told me] how they won the Technovation competition. I volunteered to help them develop their app Discardious (which my team and I are currently still helping them with), and we have not just assisted with development of their app, we are also training them so they get regular classes every week. My hope is that they become outstanding young software engineers and do well, just like their male counterparts.

I mentor a lot of people, not just the girls, but it’s been a difficult process mentoring the ladies. I have actually discovered that they seem not to believe that coding can change them and take them places like the men that come to study with us. Most of the men let go of their chosen careers and adopt software as a way to make it in life–on the other hand, the ladies tend to hold on to the careers they already have. With team CHARIS and team SCEPH, I have seen young ladies who really want to make a difference through technology.

What advice do you have for all mentors?

To mentor the girls, the first thing I did was to make them believe in themselves and their abilities to change their communities with ideas. I also taught them to see failure as a normal thing, and understand that a lot of people fail, but then get better after they try again. I have failed so many times in trying to set my company up, so I use my life experiences to inspire them. As a mentor, my job ends in showing the way, the will is invented by the girls, and this is what I make them clearly understand.

Technovation recently had the chance to talk with Houyem Boukthir, a 2015 Technovation participant from Tunisia. We got some great advice for young women interested in tech, learned how Houyem worked though challenges during the program, and what inspires her.

Tell us about yourself!

My name is Houyem Boukthir, I’m 18 years old and I live in Ariana, Tunisia.

When I was 8 I dreamt of founding a car manufacturer producing only autonomous and ecofriendly vehicles, therefore reducing stress, car accidents and pollution. When presenting the idea to my father he replied that I needed a huge amount of money in order to fulfill my dream. Thanks to my childhood optimism, that didn’t stop me — on the contrary that’s when my long journey of saving money started.

I first bought a piggy bank and started saving all my pocket money depriving myself of stuff other kids my age would buy. As I grew older I realized that money wasn’t the most important thing I needed. In fact, I needed some skills that neither school could teach me nor money could buy.

I got myself more involved in community services, jumped in every event and training I’ve heard of and with 5 other friends we founded the first club in our school counting more than 50 members.

I was obsessed with the idea of becoming a better version of myself bit by bit each day, and turning into a person who worked for change and success instead of only dreaming of it. That’s when teammate Narmine introduced me to Technovation; an experience that I’ll never forget. It made me more aware of how far I have come as an individual and how hard I will work in order to achieve my goals.

Let’s talk about the focus of this year’s challenge — Sustainable Development Goals (which you may have seen referred to in our materials as SDGs)! This year we’re challenging young women around the world to apply their creativity, ingenuity, and determination to develop a solution to a problem that falls into one of six SDG tracks: poverty, the environment, peace, equality, education, and health.

We are asking students to focus on these six tracks because we believe that tying this year’s challenge to global initiatives will help underscore the international nature of the program, the power of collective work, and the need for socially-conscious design. We want to invite young women across the world to see themselves as people who can solve big problems — and help them understand that they can start to solve them now.

The UN has defined targets to achieve for each of their Sustainable Development Goals. Technovation teams will be doing their part to help reach these targets in the 6 tracks we’ve selected, and to make a difference. The global problems we’re facing are large and numerous — but we believe that young women have the ideas, drive, and determination to lead the change for a better world.

We recently had the chance to catch up with Wendy Ho, a 2016 Technovation finalist, and hear about what projects she’s working on now, what she’s planning on doing next, and what advice she has for other women interested in technology. Wendy was part of team CodeHAUS which developed the app Ask Ada.

Tell us a little bit about yourself!
Hello! My name is Wendy Ho, and I’m from Dallas, TX in the USA. I participated in Technovation in 2016.

What was your relationship or experience with tech before Technovation?
Before Technovation, I had always wanted to program or do something with technology, but I didn’t really know where to start. More so, I thought that it was too late for me to start learning about programming on my own, since most people I knew who programmed were boys and they had started learning from summer camps or own their own since middle school. I suppose I always wanted to start programming, but I just didn’t quite believe I could learn on my own and be successful.

What made you join Technovation?

I heard about Technovation from a friend at a summer program who had participated last year. Her app concept sounded amazing, and I was stunned that she knew how to program apps. More importantly, however, I realized that she had made a difference in her school community, and I wanted to do the same to my community. I joined Technovation because I wanted a catalyst to learn how to code and to create apps that solve community issues.

We are delighted to share the story of a new team, Unity Girls Who Code, from Morristown, NJ! Unity Girls Who Code was started by a mother and daughter. This story came our way through their mentors.

Members of the ‘Unity Girls Who Code’ team at Unity Charter School in Morristown, NJ took their first Technovation field trip on a recent Saturday, to Primrose, one of many properties under the preservation auspices of Harding Land Trust in New Jersey. Given that Unity Charter School embodies sustainability at the core of its values and education, the girls chose to explore the “environment” theme this season. Diala and Jeff, co-mentors to Unity Girls Who Code, are leading the girls through the 20-week curriculum, and the girls are currently at the Ideation module.
Upon arrival at Barrett field, the girls present on this trip — Kayla, Bella and Ella — took a long walking path following tree markers as their guiding light until they reached a vast and open landing where board of trustee members of the not-for-profit Harding Land Trust organization had all come together to volunteer their time towards preservation of the land by laying soil, mulch and lining the pathways. The girls participated with delight as they picked up logs and carefully placed them along the pathways. With some logs being quite heavy, teamwork went into full force where the three girls each carried one side of the log together until they dropped it on the trail in unison. There were also ribbons wrapped around the bark of many trees; these preceded the latter placed orange markers so the girls enjoyed removing these temporary markers as they took stock of the paths they had helped restore.

I am excited and honored to see the start of the eighth season of Technovation! I wanted to share some of the history and evolution in philosophy and model so you have a sense of where we are coming from and where we are headed.

We started Technovation in 2010 as a small cohort of 45 girls, hosted by Google in Mountain View. The program ran once a week for 9 weeks, after work hours. Each team of girls had mentors who came from local universities and corporations; and the entire group was led through the curriculum by an instructor. The goal of the program was to provide a first hand experience in entrepreneurship using technology, and thereby help build a strong sense of self-efficacy in the girls.

Over the next three years we scaled the model to 6 sites in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York and Boston. As we scaled, we ran into two interesting issues: 1) We had a hard time finding instructors who were comfortable both with the entrepreneurship content as well as the technology component (this was 8 years ago, before entrepreneurship became so hip!), 2) The unforeseen issue we ran into with this model was that we were serving girls who already had access to a lot of resources. The model was constrained by the girls’ ability to access the corporation that was hosting the program.

Technovation’s parent organization is Iridescent and Iridescent’s mission is to help underserved youth, especially girls to become innovators and leaders using engineering and technology.

So keeping this mission in mind, we put the Technovation curriculum online in 2013, using Mozilla’s P2PU platform. We were one of the first online courses (this was before MOOC was even a word :). We had no idea what would happen, but it seemed that we needed to do something dramatically different to increase access to technology education. We leveraged Iridescent’s global networks and were able to get girls from 19 countries to participate in the program. The girls from Nigeria had a chance to present their app to theFirst Lady of Nigeria and theUN’s ITU Secretary General congratulated them on their work.

We were heartened by the uptake and proceeded to devote the next 3 years to expanding the program internationally, as well as evaluating the long-term impact of the model on the girls.

Technovation recently had the chance to sit down with Amina Chida, a participant from 2015 and talk about who and what inspires Amina, what advice she has for young women interested in tech, and what tools and strategies she uses to overcome challenges.

Tell us about yourself!

I am Amina Chida I am 18 years old and I am from El Kef. I study in the Pioneer secondary school there in the Mathematics section. I am really interested in technology. I want to become an engineer–I dream of inventing something that will change the world and make it a better place. I dream of being a leader and a global changemaker.

Who or what inspired you to pursue tech? Who is your role model in tech?

What inspired me to pursue tech … I would say that my own curiosity sparkled my interest and got me involved in the tech field. I am really keen on using the computer I use for almost everything : chatting, playing games, reading articles, watching movies, discovering news… and I used to ask myself these questions a lot : What is the secret behind this amazing invention ? How did they do it? How did they create the internet? What lies behind this screen of pictures, videos, chatrooms … I got to the point where being a simple user and consumer wasn’t enough anymore and felt I should find an answer to these questions. That is how I started searching and learning technology.

My role model is Bill Gates, I consider him a legend and I don’t know what the world of tech would be without him. He is really intelligent and I admire him for following his passion and changing humanity. I also worship him because apart from being the biggest business owner on earth he is a philanthropist.

What advice would you give to young women interested in going into tech?

I want to encourage every young woman fond of technology to pursue her interest and to work hard in order to accomplish what she aims for.

If you are a girl and you love tech then don’t ever let people tell you you cannot go into tech because you are not smart enough and tech is too complicated for you. Programming is difficult that is for sure, but you don’t have to be a genius to create something new to learn how to program! If you have the passion and the determination to succeed in tech, then know that you have what it takes to be the next “ Steve Jobs” or the next “bill Gates “ and don’t ever let the fact that men are dominating this field keep you from delving deeper into tech ! You have to show the world you can do it. Have faith in yourself and believe that “when there is a will there is a way.” … Although it may sound cliché, saying this to yourself really helps.

Finally, you don’t have to miss any opportunity ! There are plenty of programs, challenges, competitions, workshops, internships that will help you develop your technological skills. Get involved, participate, learn as much as you can.

Tell us about a challenge you’ve faced with technology or Technovation, and how you overcame it.

The biggest challenge I faced with both technology and Technovation is when my coding doesn’t work. I have spent days trying to program something and no matter what I did my coding still didn’t operate. Sometimes, I was so angry I wanted to switch off my computer and give up. But, eventually I managed to overcome my anger and to persist till I succeeded to make the right code and the app operated! What led me to this is certainly patience, perseverance, and especially not being ashamed to ask for help and assistance.

Would you like to share your story with the Technovation community? Email Maggie at [email protected]